Facebookers, Stop It. Stop It. No!

Here’s something I don’t do very often: a pet-peeve blog. Let’s do this.

You know what really grinds my gears? Those math polls on Facebook. You know the ones like

1+1+1+1*0+1 =

• 6
• 5
• 0
• 1
• …

The Social Media Garden and How I Make a Salad I Want to Eat

We’re bringing our relationships, no matter how minor or inconsequential, online.  The struggle, though, is how to translate our analog relationships to the digital paradigm.  When I accept a friend request from a cousin I only see at family holidays or a classmate from high school that I had one class with, they are automatically given the same status within the social network as say my wife or a friend I see every couple of days.  Twitter and Facebook and the like have tools available that allow me to treat these connections differently within the network, but everything is still so new, there is no existing etiquette and protocol.  We’re still learning how all of this is supposed to work.  How do I make sure the people I want to hear from, the people with whom I have real connections, are given priority in my feed?  More importantly, how do I filter out the noise of the over-sharers, the people that don’t realize everything they post is shouted at such a volume that everyone they are connected to can hear it?  What does it mean to friend someone and to be someone’s friend?

Our private selves are cyber selves

Internet privacy has been in the news a lot lately, mostly thanks to Facebook. Last night I happened upon the lecture by Eben Moglen on that very topic.